Telling the Story of His Family, and of a Union

‘Brothers on the Line,’ Sasha Reuther’s Film on the U.A.W.

After a Ford attack, from left, Robert Kanter, Richard Frankensteen and Walter Reuther.Credit
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

It’s a powerful image: Blood streaming down a union organizer’s nose and splattered all over his white shirt after thugs from the Ford Motor Company attacked him and others who were distributing union fliers.

That 1937 photograph is just one of the searing scenes in “Brothers on the Line,” a new documentary about the Reuther brothers: Walter, the future United Auto Workers president standing next to the bloodied organizer, and Victor and Roy. Together they played a pivotal role in transforming the United Auto Workers into what was for decades the nation’s most powerful labor union.

Victor Reuther’s grandson Sasha Reuther features that photo prominently in the new documentary, which he directed and helped produce, to tell how the brothers built the U.A.W. and how that union helped raise living standards for not just one million autoworkers, but also for a large swath of America. The film shows the fierce struggles and sit-down strikes that led to the unionization of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and how the U.A.W. played a major role in underwriting the civil rights movement as well as that of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers.

“Some will say it’s a love letter to the family, and it’s the Reuther boy who did it,” Sasha Reuther said. But he added that he took pains to include criticisms of the Reuthers, showing blacks in the 1960s protesting that they were underrepresented in the union’s hierarchy and complaints that Walter purged many Communists who had played an important role in building the union.

Photo

The Reuther brothers, from left, Roy, Walter and VictorCredit
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

Still, as a family member, “I felt destined to tell this story,” Mr. Reuther, 36, a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, said recently at his Upper East Side apartment. “I feared that if I didn’t do it, it’s going to disappear.”

Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said, “There’s a dramatic story to be told about the history of the U.A.W., and it needs to be told to every generation.”

The documentary, which will be shown on Tuesday in Manhattan as part of the IFC Center’s Stranger Than Fiction series, focuses on Walter, a gifted speaker, shrewd negotiator and confidant of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The film also tells of Victor Reuther, the most intellectual of the brothers, who became head of the U.A.W.’s international division, and of Roy Reuther, who, as the union’s political director, used its power to help elect Kennedy and push through Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act and other landmark legislation.

At some early screenings, Sasha Reuther said, he was struck by how little many young people know about the history of the labor movement. “The immediate reaction is, ‘Why haven’t I heard of any of this before?’ ” he said.

He added that he was especially moved by the way an African-American student responded at a Washington high school. The teenager was surprised to see whites attacked, Mr. Reuther said. “He said, ‘I thought things like that only happened when African-Americans were beaten up in the civil rights movement.’ ”

For Mr. Reuther, one of the biggest challenges with his debut film was shaping a concise and moving story out of the ocean of archival material he discovered — not just that in the union’s archives, but also nearly 100 hours of 16-millimeter film at Wayne State University in Detroit. So he brought in a veteran film editor, Deborah Peretz, to help mold and streamline the documentary.

“I suppose you can say we had an embarrassment of riches,” Ms. Peretz said.

Professor Lichtenstein, also the author of a biography of Walter Reuther, “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit,” said he was impressed by the archival material the filmmakers found, especially a recording of a phone conversation in which Johnson warned his longtime ally Walter Reuther not to turn against him and oppose the war in Vietnam.

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“I want you to tell the rest of them that I’m no goddamn fascist,” Johnson says.

Linda Reuther, a daughter of Walter, said that segment was eye-opening: “I was opposed to the war for a long time. I had no idea why Daddy wouldn’t be against the war. It didn’t make sense to me until I saw that clip.”

Some critics say the Reuthers were so successful in pushing up wages and benefits that it made Detroit’s Big Three automakers uncompetitive once Japanese imports started flowing in. Professor Lichtenstein said, “The film puts the question forward about what happened to the auto industry, but it never comes to an answer on that one.”

Asserting that there was some complacency in the U.A.W.’s leadership after Walter died in 1970, Sasha Reuther said that union officials focused more on continuing the great wages of the past than on keeping the automakers competitive. “Any organization like that has to be flexible,” he said. “The contract should be a living document and needs to change with the times.”

Photo

Louis G. Seaton of General Motors, left, at negotiations with Walter Reuther.Credit
Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

He said he felt fortunate that Martin Sheen agreed to narrate the film, an opportunity the actor leapt at. “The Reuther brothers, particularly Walter, have been heroes of mine since my childhood,” Mr. Sheen said. Not only did they build the U.A.W., he added, “they basically created the middle class.”

There had been other efforts to document the Reuthers’ legacy on film, Sasha Reuther said. He recalled that soon after the 1992 release of “Hoffa,” which starred Jack Nicholson as the Teamsters leader, Hollywood producers approached Victor Reuther.

He said his grandfather rejected the idea, fearing that such a film would, like “Hoffa,” focus on violent episodes, like an assassination attempt on Walter’s life — a shooting that left Victor with a glass eye — and confrontations like the one with the Ford thugs that came to be known as the Battle of the Overpass.

But making a movie was something Sasha Reuther, like a number of relatives of other notable figures recently (Deepak Chopra, Ethel Kennedy, William Colby) had long considered. “It’s been in my mind and heart for 20 years,” he said, and he even filmed 10 hours of interviews with his grandfather while a student.

After graduating, he made a living directing and producing reality TV, commercials and music videos, but prepared on and off for a Reuther brothers film. It wasn’t until 2004, at a memorial service for his grandfather, that his wife, Sonya, pressed him to step up. Pointing out the U.A.W. and civil rights leaders in attendance, he recalled, “She said, ‘Your story, the family story, is right here.’ ” And she told him, “If you don’t do something soon, a lot of these people will be gone.”

So Sasha Reuther plunged in. “The message of the film,” he said, “is that they were about something bigger than the fight just to make union jobs better.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Telling the Story Of His Family, And of a Union. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe